I watched another Peterson’s talk: “Who Dares Say He Believes in God?”.

Basically, people kept asking Peterson whether he believes in God, and he kept getting annoyed and wishing he had more than one minute to articulate the answer. So he went and talked about it for like an hour and a half. He also hinted that a thousand years would have been more appropriate but compromises had to be made.

The actual answer can be summarized as a) “I act as if God exists” and b) “but if you took the idea of God seriously, you would try to be a Really Good Person, and I don’t quite see anyone taking the idea seriously enough to make it believable that they actually think God exists”. The rest was spent talking about various things, including for some reason Marxism, which was kinda out of place but whatever.

And now the notes, which are really more of random things I will think about in my spare time and not really notes. First of all:

[...] values like nobility, endurance, courage, responsibility [...]

I spent about ten minutes afterwards trying to figure what exactly nobility was. You see, I’m trying to join the ranks of nobility myself:

My best idea is that nobility is playing in hard mode. You do [something] that makes your life harder and then you have to work harder to regain the losses, over and over again. Lying to avoid hurting other people is easy, not lying and still not hurting other people is (sometimes) hard, etc; same for begging. N=2, must be true.

I haven’t thought about the other three but I should. “Should” is a tricky word though. Whatever, “I will unless for some reason I won’t.” Okay, next:

Treating yourself as if you have inherent moral worth is a rather cool idea, and an extremely non-obvious one. If you do that, your life will improve for [some reasons that I don’t remember].

This goes on my list of hypotheses to check.

God is dead, meaning that now we have to create our own values. But we can’t actually create values that would be completely our own. Try doing that for a week, you will fail.

I wish I had found Peterson when I was trying to understand what the hell David Chapman (meaningness.com) was talking about. He says “Meaning is neither objective nor subjective” a lot and never quite explains it in a way that would be understandable.

Collective guilt is a stupid idea.

I always thought collective guilt was a stupid idea but at the same time thought it was kinda reasonable to feel that somebody could be blamed for what their [group] did. Now I wonder why exactly it is reasonable to feel that way. This goes on my list of things to think about.

I don’t have that many lists. But I do have, like, several.

Finally:

It’s easy to hold several contradicting thoughts in your head if you’ve never gone into the world and tried to do something. You can say “A” today and “not A” tomorrow, and you will notice the contradiction only when you try to act on it.

Does tweeting count? Probably not.

Damn.